What do you like best?

The fact that as a marketer, I have the ability to create 3 different types of databases to hold customer info and I have full access to that data at any time is invaluable. "Set Data" and "Get Data" are very underutilized features of this tool where marketers can update any of those databases automatically based on consumer actions. Salesforce, YesMail, and other platforms either don't give access to databases to the marketing team, or they don't have any databases. This causes marketing teams to be dependent upon a Business Intelligence team to build lists, etc. and most of your time is spent putting together campaigns instead of automating and analyzing. The most important key to this platform and making it successful is getting data into the system, and in what database you place it in. Make sure you pay attention to the functionality of all three databases and you're mapping data accordingly. This will make or break the product.

What do you dislike?

There are quirks to this platform, as would be expected of any enterprise solution. RPL is a language that can be used to program emails. However, Responsys doesn't tell you that RPL cannot be used in Forms to submit data until you reach out to Support and they give you the programming language you'll need. Why an issue like this exists is unexplainable and can be very frustrating when building. Also, the training for this product is very underwhelming. You can go to a 3rd party like Shaw + Scott, and it won't make any difference. This is the main reason the product is so misunderstood.

Recommendations to others considering the product

This platform is ONLY to be used by companies who are marketing-centric. Sadly, most places I consult allow the Business Intelligence team to control marketing. For those companies, Salesforce makes more sense. That is a batch-and-blast system that makes sense in the business intelligence driven world. However, if you're a company that is dedicated to marketing, who has a person/team dedicated to email who is self-motivated, this is the only platform to use. Your learning curve for content that resonates with your clients, etc. will be so much shorter and more aggressive in Responsys than any platform out there because you'll spend much more time analyzing and much less time building. You'll have to retrain your mind to work in a situation-centric mind frame instead of an individual driven marketing world (building lists). This is the most mis-understood ESP on the market and sadly most clients don't even come close to utilizing the system because they haven't been shown why it is so powerful.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

The benefits are countless. I work at Accenture and have helped many clients in multiple verticals optimize this product. They have abandoned cart, confirmation email, SMS, MMS, display, and other automated functions that can be utilized. Sadly, most people don't understand the power of this tool. I've been using it since 2011 and it takes time, practice, and a change in perspective for most people and how they go about doing email. If you embrace the power of the tool and dedicate a marketing person to this platform, the possibilities are endless.

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What do you like best?

Responsys by Oracle is a great tool for enterprise email marketing. It is easy to create a large number of segments from your customer base, based on any number of attributes. There are myriad options in terms of creating emails from templates or uploading custom designs. Responsys is also a great reporting platform, allowing you to get all the info you need about how your email campaigns are performing.

What do you dislike?

Responsys is not necessarily the easiest software to use. After working with MailChimp at a previous job, it definitely took a lot longer to get used to the interface and features of Responsys. However, this is likely the case with any piece of powerful software.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are working with clients who use Oracle Responsys to manage their email marketing campaigns, and we help those clients with their email performance reporting.

What do you like best?

This platform offers capability for very detailed personalization

What do you dislike?

This platform is very versatile and allows for very in depth personalization, but that intricacy also comes with a VERY poor user interface. It is not at all intuitive, features have misleading names, and bugs are slow to be fixed

Recommendations to others considering the product

Be VERY sure that you need to have the "Cadillac" of ESPs before you sign on with Responsys. My company decided they DID need this (before I joined the company) and then they did not have the staff to support all of its capabilities, so much of their investment was wasted. It is also not at all easy to use or intuitive, so be prepared for a LOT of hand holding.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We use Responsys for our email program, and to support our sale's representatives relationships with our customers. Responsys allows us to be mostly self-serve for many of our needs and projects, so we save money by not needing to pay their teams to do work for us

What do you like best?

Responsys is the Ferrari of ESPs. As with other reviewers, Responsys is an extremely robust tool. From security to customisation, if you are well resourced (both in monetary and human resource).

What do you dislike?

You have to ask yourself, do I need an enterprise solution? Or, do I just need to do the basics? Yes the below is subjective as I represent a small business. Ready through the following 10 tips to evaluate whether Responsys is worth putting into your consideration set.

1. Responsys is priced as an enterprise solution. I've never seen such a high CPM cost for sending <20M emails p.a. in my career? Why? They cost their services as a 'blended CPM'. Vs just a CPM for email sends.

2. You will need developers to use the product. Don't bother considering Responsys unless you have a robust front/back-end development team. If you don't, you'll have Responsys users getting very frustrated by a product far too advanced for the average marketer.

3. It is a min. requirement you know SQL to be an user of this product. Have a junior marketer who needs to use Responsys? Get them trained on SQL as it'll really help.

4. Training is too broad and expensive. In-person or online, their training skims over how to use their features vs. going deeper into common challenges marketers face. Real missed opportunities here by their training teams.

5. All post-integrations will cost money. Best you allocate at least another 10-15% on-top of the annual fee as you need to have budget reserved to further optimise Responsys to your needs.

6. Unless you pay, you'll get basic, reactive account management included. Smaller clients will get an account manager who manages at least 6 clients = can be a challenge to get a hold of them at short notice.

7. Need quick technical support? You'll have to' raise a ticket for that. If you need a quick answer for a question, Oracle support typically wont be able to help on the spot. This can quickly amplify your frustration if you just need somebody to guide you through usability challenge within the platform.

8. The interface is not for dummies. It is clunky to use at times. It take quite a long time to send a campaign if you do not use the campaign on a daily basis. I like to think of ESP programs to be easy as learning Google Analytics. A day or two and you can generally find your way. Not here. You really need to be trained up to use the interface.

9. Not a turn-key ESP. Everything has to be customised from scratch with Responsys which is frustrating. It is similar to Airbus creating the A380 aeroplane. They manufacture the plan but it is up to the airline to customise it.

10. Basic campaign insight for an enterprise solution. The architecture is the USP here, not the insight tools. If you need an ESP that provides a mini-BI tool, you will not get this from Responsys Insights (the name for their reporting tool). It only provides basic email behaviour reporting.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you can support an enterprise ESP, consider Responsys. I.e. you need 3-5 staff to get Responsys up and running otherwise you'll haemorrhage cash like a slot machine. A combination of developers, a mid-level marketer and manager to lay down the strategic objectives to Responsys will yield the best ROI.

When you look at the 'Marketing Automation features' section of this review, note all is possible 'if you pay to integrate it'. Typically, unless you can integrate INTO Responsys, you cannot access/use it.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Trying to create a meaningful dialogue with the customer through the email medium. With the romantic view of 'doing the basics well', the Responsys platform has forced us to really understand the customer journey and how email plays a part in conversion. Their platform is very robust with many fail safes should the user miss particular detail. For example, when creating an automated email program, the canvas tool is very robust highlighting potential errors and warnings e.g. customers who could receive more than 5 emails per week.

What do you like best?

Responsys was able to do absolutely everything we wanted it to do. It seemed to flawlessly integrate with every third-party app on the market. Their Program feature was very powerful and intuitive to use. Their best feature, however, was the relationship they had with us. Our account rep was practically like a member of the team. We spoke multiple times per week for over 5 years while I was at the company and he visited us on-site several times per year.

What do you dislike?

Their proprietary programming language (RPL) was extremely difficult to learn for someone with a marketing background. I spent hours upon hours attempting to code things like the order and ship confirmation emails, basically relying on trial and error and countless tests. Once I finally seemed to get the hang of things after a few years, they up and changed to a new programming language that required all emails to eventually be re-coded. The learning curve for getting the most out of Responsys is unbelievably high. Their reporting was a little clunky and had a serious lag time. Many times a query needed to be manually written, requiring the knowledge of MySQL. After writing a query and saving and testing, the query would lose all formatting and spacing. Lists imports were time-consuming and unintuitive.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Using Responsys is a full-time job; it requires a very smart, dedicated individual with a background in web development to get the most out of the very powerful platform.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We needed to re-market to customers based on their past browsing and purchase behavior, and third-party integrations into Responsys accomplished those tasks easily. The same could be said for abandoned cart and browsing programs.

What do you like best?

Good product, I feel like our data and information is very secure through Responsys. This vendor is great for a bigger company that has at least 1-2 dedicated email specialists working in it. It is one of the top email service providers.

What do you dislike?

It can be a bit of a beast to use. Some times there are multiple steps to get a simple thing done and creating a program is not always intuitive. Also, the way that you have to set up a filter can be very complicated and confusing, depending on what you want to do. Also, to send triggered campaigns

Recommendations to others considering the product

Make sure you have the time and effort to dedicate to implementing Responsys and setting it up properly. Also, make sure you have at least 1 dedicated email specialist to work in Responsys - not a good choice if you are not planning on having someone be a dedicated Responsys user.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

This is our email service provider. We use it to send promotional emails, transactional emails and follow up emails. We do not use there services for abandon cart or search abandon as it is way too difficult to set that up and manage with a small team.

What do you like best?

Our Customer Success Managers have always been great, and that makes a difference when spending a large amount of money on a technology we use everyday. The tool itself is fairly straightforward and easy to use, and offers opportunity to send dynamic content to customers, which is a bonus.

What do you dislike?

Training materials/"Help" documentation online is a bit confusing and not always easy to locate what you need. I usually have to open a support ticket for most problems and then have them help me find things that way.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We use Responsys for all of our email needs and it has been a great product for us.

What do you like best?

The suite is very robust, and always at least a step ahead of what I am trying to accomplish. The platform is very flexible in handling any data source needed for segmentation. It is easy to create different testing scenarios, automated programs, dynamic content, reusable segments and more and also have real-time reporting around campaigns.

Customer support and my customer success manager have also been very key to helping to accomplish campaign goals. I have used several enterprise level email solutions, and none compare to the support and response that I receive from Responsys.

What do you dislike?

With any tool there is a learning curve. Responsys is very robust, and I feel there is functionality that I am not using today. This does give me room to grow with the suite, instead of outgrowing it.

Update: Since the acquisition by Oracle support has changed. I used to be able to get someone on the phone immediately to assist with any problems, now there is a ticketing system and delay in response.

Recommendations to others considering the product

I would recommend that you consider where you would like your programs to be in the future, and make sure that whatever platform you choose will be able to support those goals + provide the personnel to help push you there.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

The main problem Responsys has helped me solve, is getting closer to the 1-1 relationship with customers, by allowing us to continue to grow the automation strategy, implement dynamic content, and segment smarter.

What do you like best?

The reporting is a pivot table, which is great as an analyst but my boss or anyone without those skills would have a hard time with the reports..

Email campaign dashboard is nice to look at, not sure if it's exactly easy to use (I'm not building the campaigns)

What do you dislike?

Reports could be difficult to use.

Very technical in it's layout-- not for the "easy-to-use marketer"

We had trouble with the implementation, along with training.

The help guide isn't very helpful, and the customer portal for web tickets isn't great.

If you haven't been taught how to use the tool it 's very difficult to use. Not intuitive.

Automatically suppresses prefixes. I'm not sure if anyone was told that in the implementation process, but we have many customers that have info@ and sales@ as their prefixes and we've lost $$ because it was automatically suppresses.

Have had issues with our cart abandonment email series, and as I said before the customer care is not the most helpful.

You cannot send multiple lists 1 email. You have to create multiple emails per list.

Recommendations to others considering the product

It really depends on who will be using this product, as I mentioned before a analytical/technical mind would do best as it's not intuitive.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

The interface is pretty simple, even if lacking in aesthetics, making this a really short ramp for newcomers. Everything is exactly where it should be, making navigation simple and straightforward.

What do you dislike?

The pricing is too high for what you receive "out of the box". You get a lot more value with Salesforce marketing cloud. Also, Responsys falls short when it comes to integrating the product with other services. There is a lot of downtime, so expect the tool to be unavailable at least a couple times per month. Downtime is inconvenient because the platform has no way of correcting delivery time for those messages delayed from downtime - all your subsequent messaging will also be delayed. The self-service model comes with lackluster support and you may have to wait several days, if not weeks, for a response to your tickets.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you are looking for something with all the bells and whistles, then this is not your product. They will nickel and dime you for every added feature, and it will take months to get those features up and running because of a lackluster customer service model that really pushes you towards full-service.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Email marketing is all about getting the right message to the right person at the right time. Responsys can help you do this with appropriate triggers and automations. The data model is fairly flat which makes adding new tables a breeze, but sometimes that data lives a bit out of your reach (when using hourly files as a trigger event).

What do you like best?

It is simple to navigate and set-up campaigns. The format is easy to use of knowing which steps are next to complete when sending an email. Testing is just as simple, and in-system editing is much easier as you don't see nearly as many product codes as you do when using competitors.

What do you dislike?

There are no back actions. If you wanted to go back into the last view you were in, you have to back fully out and then navigate back into the folder and the campaign. I wish there was an easier way to do that navigation.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We use Responsys for email, SMS, and Push. This is a great tool to be able to do these cross platform actions.

What do you like best?

My company does not have best in class data management. Therefore we rely heavily on our ESP for audience segmentation and message personalization. Responsys table structure with extension tables works well for us because different product teams can create tables for specific use cases versus having to update our main database table structure. The Program Tool enables messaging sequencing well. The reporting is also detailed and easy to manipulate.

What do you dislike?

The platform is not easy to use and requires more skill in the users such as HTML, segmentation logic, and SQL.

Recommendations to others considering the product

This product will serve you well if you plan to use Enterprise Oracle products and if you have a strong team to use and manage the platform. Responsys also has very strong segmentation capabilities (and fast deployment times. If you are planning to integrate real-time activities via third party APIs you may also want to look at platforms that plug in to other systems. If you are self-service plan to have significant budget available for support, training and projects. If you don't have the ability to hire strong candidates it may be more worthwhile to hire responsys for email set up and deployment.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are able to manage the reach and suppressions for our advertiser driven campaigns. We have also successfully built lifecycle campaigns to deploy a series of emails based on use interactions.

What do you like best?

The targeting capabilities are amazing and the program builder makes it easy to build out full programs in a very intuitive ui.

What do you dislike?

I don't like that Oracle doesn't provide in depth training and that it costs thousands of dollars to attend a training.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are able to target our customers within our file by different attributes which have resulted in increased engagement metrics as well as increase in traffic to the site, which then brings in incremental revenue.

What do you like best?

I like that we can use Responsys to integrate with our consumers in real time when we are evaluating participation and registration conversions.

What do you dislike?

It seems like the clients who actually use responsys on their end aren't very educated on the product at all which makes it difficult for us.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Make sure to get proper training on it because it is a lot of information

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

It helps us with analytics and tracking the success of a campaign. We are able to integrate whether it be looking at reviews posted on a microsite or managing member gated promotions where a consumers has to become a member or rewards member per say to join a promotion.

What do you like best?

We thought Responsys was top of the line. There are some nice features, but nothing that most competitor's don't have. There are an unacceptable amount of bugs and customer service issues.

Having worked with many ESPs in the past, I would recommend Listrak, then Silverpop. (I have absolutely no dog in this fight).

What do you dislike?

We wait months upon months for BUGS to be fixed. I'm talking about things like not tracking opens! There are constantly bugs in the system, but it is not because they are taking extra time to QA. In fact, they launched a new release this weekend that completely shut down all our campaigns and we received no notifications or heads-up, though we have all notifications set up.

As another example, in both the sales demo and in our first onboarding demo were were shown the ability to process files hourly instead of only daily. This was a requirement of the project. A week before go-live, the feature magically disappeared. We immediately brought it to their attention and are STILL waiting (four months later) for the approval of of our account manager's manager to enable it again.

As other reviewers have noted, they have this ridiculous link tracking setup. It makes everything really complicated, especially since there is a known bug that converts & in your URLs to & every time you open the campaign. (Your URL tracking will not work and your link tracking within Responsys will also not work, unless you manually correct this every single time). I have put in several support tickets asking for when this will be fixed, and they just close out the ticket saying this is a known bug. It has been over five months.

Lastly, we paid a large sum of money for onboarding support. In fact, it was required. None of the training or support helped us actually setup our account. We would have 3 people on weekly calls, but 0 people would ever be able to answer any questions or even get us any answers. We used trial and error and an excruciating amount of our time to get things going.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Obviously, we use this for our internal email programs and campaigns. We also pull customer data from Responsys for offline campaigns.

What do you like best?

The Interact platform allows me to control my email marketing program without having to rely on my Engineering resources. Resources are always at a premium so being able to do advanced campaigns with plug and play tools has been great.

What do you dislike?

Link tables. Having to create link tables separate from the uploaded email creative is time consuming.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Responsys is a robust email solution for sophisticated email marketing programs. If you are looking for a solution that is a more streamlined WYSIWYG platform...this is likely not the platform for you.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Marketing automation. Through the Program functionality in Interact we are able to build automation into our programs without the need for extensive IT resources. We can develop and control the creative and testing process without being limited by a reliance on other groups within the organization.

What do you like best?

The program design robust-ness and flexibility, along with the advanced options for pulling in data from key sources (website behavior, purchase data, CRM data, etc.) into the relational database, and both easy-to-use basic targeting/segmentation as well as SQL capabilities for the advanced marketers.

What do you dislike?

It's not the most intuitive or visually appealing UI. Some of the most basic things I would think the tool has, it doesn't, for example: automatic link tracking (you have to set it up on your own manually), automatic "view this email online" web versions of emails (you have to create it on your own), doesn't track % of mobile openers/clickers, and the campaign assets are dispersed throughout the UI. If you have a tech savvy marketer, it'll all be fine with some training though.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Figure out first what your top priorities are and what's most important, then evaluate the "how" it gets accomplished with Responsys vs. another. Most ESPs are getting to a point of being able to do the same things, it's just how complicated or resource-heavy is it to get what you want.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Being able to do greater targeting and personalization based on web browsing behavior, purchases, products registered, CRM data, etc. We've seen a lift in opens, clicks, and revenue when we personalize.

What do you like best?

Technical Flexibility and control over database structure - the ability for the client to be able to customize and easily create complicated lifecycle marketing programs once the database is set up.

What do you dislike?

This system can be used by beginners but to really benefit from the power of responsys users need to be advanced in their strategic and technical skill set. There isn't an easy way to be move from beginner to advanced - advanced training and complete documentation could be improved.

Recommendations to others considering the product

It is the only ESP that allows your marketing programs to reach sophisticated levels without extensive customization by the ESP. But, this requires that your staff is technologically saavy and have the resources to build these marketing programs and data integrations.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Increased revenued and set up of multiple triggered programs without a la carte costs to have the ESP set up

What do you like best?

Responsys provides a ton of features for dynamic and advanced automation. It also offers a robust reporting suite.

What do you dislike?

The UI is the most unintuitive platform I've ever worked in. There is little to no information on how to use the product without paying for additional training. The help files are useless.

I've had 3 account reps in a year; one was helpful, the other 2 contributed very little.

Because data from our website and purchase information are stored outside of the main database in supplemental tables, you can't create lists or campaigns based on it without knowing SQL. In other words, if I wanted to send an email campaign to everyone who purchased X product this year, I would not be able to do this myself within the filter building tool, and would need a developer to create this query in SQL.

On the whole the support team is very difficult to deal with, although there have been a couple of very people who I've spoken with.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Do your research. Responsys can be a very powerful tool, but it's likely that you'll need substantial technical support to implement many of the advanced features.

What do you like best?

The main appeal was the self-service model and cross-channel approach. Our team was interested in owning marketing campaigns and having instant reporting to optimize our email strategy. We are excited to have cross-channel functionality at our disposal and look forward to mixing that into our campaigns.

What do you dislike?

Because of internal data issues, we aren't immediately able to move forward implementing as many automated programs that we would like. We find ourselves using Responsys as a medium to send more manual lists which doesn't exactly adhere to the hands-off, orchestrated platform that Responsys projects. To integrate the variety of complex campaigns that the company talks about is a lengthy process which we hope to get to soon.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Responsys definitely fulfills on cutting edge technology and has a great customer success team to understand your business model and strategize with your team to create the highest quality campaigns to fit company needs.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are trying to play with different personalization options and localized/relevant communications are extremely important to our business model. Additionally, with Responsys, we have greater control of our data which allows us to think of automated email campaigns that allow us to send and wait for results. We are able to capture different audiences and deliver relevant, timely messaging. We have seen benefits with the display channel which has been an interesting and rewarding venue to connect with members, something we had never capitalized on before.

What do you like best?

Responsys is focused on their cusotmer's success...period. Each Responsys team member, assigned to your account, is measured on the KPI's that you set and in my experience this has increased the level of ownership from each person who touches our account. It's also encouraged proactive engagement to help grow and optimize our book of business. Finally, Responsys has amazing services with industry leading experts (Strategy, Creative, and Tech) to help you reach your goals.

What do you dislike?

Responsys really listens to their customer's needs and formulates updates and releases around these. My "wish for" is increased data integration within the tool so as to take an "unlimited data" approach - nearly impossible, but it's a wish. Their data integration is good, and I know that this is a priority in 2014.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you're looking for an email providers, definately put Responsys in the running. Consider all your options and do your research to find what fit's YOUR needs - they're a top pick in my book as well as Forrester's!!

What do you like best?

The software is definitely powerful - we're using Program to send triggered campaigns, have automated data flows between our back-end and their system, and are starting to explore the new Reporting functionality. In general I've found Technical Support to be top-notch.

What do you dislike?

I find the v6 UI unintuitive, although that could be because I am accustomed to v5, and some things would really benefit from having two windows open at once, which v6 doesn't allow. The system for seed and proof launches is unnecessarily complicated.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Responsys definitely feels like a system that rewards an investment of time and energy. If you're just trying to send the occasional drip message or can't dedicate a resource to managing the platform, I'd counsel caution. I also agree with another review that a relatively technically-minded person will have more luck than a pure marketer.

What do you like best?

Responsys allows you to leverage customer data to create complex campaign segmentation and build robust lifecycle programs. The ability to coordinate Email and SMS campaigns and optimize customer touch points is easy to set up and gives us more power over how and when we communicate with our customers.

What do you dislike?

They have lengthy maintenance windows about once a month. Due to the way our system is set up we are unable to send emails during this time period.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Even though it costs more than some competitors it's worth the investment if you have robust data and really want to take your marketing efforts to the next level.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Ease of implementing new campaign lifecycles, ability to coordinate Email, SMS, and Direct Mail campaigns in one platform, enhanced targeting and segmentation capabilities, less effort for IT to set up new campaigns, less reliance on analytics team to pull targeted lists, and a customized data structure that allows us to use Responsys as a CRM-lite

What do you like best?

The account team that I work with is stellar. They are extremely responsive to our ever changing needs. They bring us new opportunities both within email channel and cross channel marketing. They have brought efficiency to our teams in the email creation process. The results from both standard marketing campaigns and triggered ones have been staggeringly good. We have not had an idea that they have not been able to figure out how to execute when it comes to personalizing/dynamic content.

What do you dislike?

The reporting tool can be a bit slow but always works in the end.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you are looking for the platform that will enable you to stretch your imagination on marketing campaigns along with your ROI - Responsys is it.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

Responsys allows for complex filtering and dynamic content, which enables us to really target our customers so we're reaching them with the right information at the right time. There are plenty of automation options to make email tracks and testing -- even complicated ones -- simple for the user to set up.

What do you dislike?

With the amount of data we house, sometimes filter counts, email previews, and reports can be slow to load.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you use customer segmentation, Responsys is an especially great choice. Everyone I've worked with is knowledgeable and in-the-know about what's next in email marketing. (Note: we are a self-service client so don't use any of their full-service options). It's a robust platform so the onboarding is a bit overwhelming -- a lot to learn upfront in order to get the most out of it.

What do you like best?

Responsys table structure with extension tables works well because different product teams can create tables for specific use cases versus having to update main database table structure. The Program Tool enables messaging sequencing well. The reporting is also detailed and easy to manipulate

What do you dislike?

doesn like the interface much, looks polished but not user friendly

Recommendations to others considering the product

Good tool

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

Responsys provides all the basic necessities needed for most client email marketing needs. Allows for dynamic, segmented campaigns that enables your marketing team to gain customer insight and provide more customized, consumer-centric campaigns.

What do you dislike?

Support team doesn't seem to always have all the answers. Lots of glitches with every upgrade. Uploading and exporting data can be very time consuming for large scale accounts.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Pinpoint your client needs and measure it against the competitors. Responsys is very salesy and likes to go after big name clients. Some businesses may find competitors meet their needs at a fraction of the cost but you need to make sure that the solutions provider is also one that will be able to manage your growth over time.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Responsys was utilized for quarterly newsletters, daily launches and automated programs. It has been an efficient provider for our client needs.

What do you like best?

Responsys is a leader in providing a platform that allows digital marketers the ability to create multi-channel digital programs. Their product is easy enough to use that business professionals can create these multi-touch experiences with little technical experience.

What do you dislike?

I'd say that there can be some difficulty in securing the necessary data needed to illustrate financial impact of the cross channel experience. However, they have been very receptive to this issue and proactively building solutions that enable the necessary ROI analysis.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Taking digital communication (email + display + sms) and truly integrating these in a focused one to one aproach.

What do you like best?

Their platform provides a powerful, easy-to-use selection of integrated applications to create, design and manage cross-channel marketing campaigns. To be effective, multi-channel marketing needs to be supported by a great product, professional services and years of research... and Responsys delivers.

What do you dislike?

CRM integration issues to legacy systems

Recommendations to others considering the product

Choosing the self-service model will certainly require an internal employee (or two) at a higher skill-set level in order to get the most out of all the features.

What do you like best?

Responsys Interact 6 is a very robust platform that has a lot to offer the modern marketer. Most of all, we have enjoyed their dedication to our success while respecting how we have chosen to integrate with their platform.

What do you dislike?

The platform is not for those who have a weak heart. It takes time and dedication to learning how to best utilize the platform.

What do you like best?

The Responsys platform is really state-of-the-art and fairly easy to use. They have developed their cross-channel offering quite a bit although I can't compare these tools to the competition. The account/success support is great and the team is really involved in getting you to grow and succeed.

What do you dislike?

Responsys can be an expensive solution although I think it can also really bring your marketing to a higher level.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Having a strong Business Intelligence infrastructure is definitely a big help to take advantage of Responsys to its fullest.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Automation and personalization are the two most important areas where we'd like to make progress.

What do you like best?

Without prior experience, I was able to build and launch complex Email campaigns, after the sudden departure of a direct report. The tool is easy to learn, easy to use, is flexible, and has certain safety features built in that prevented novice errors

What do you dislike?

The reporting could be more robust, particularly in the creation of visual reports like heat maps.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Negotiate hard for best pricing and build in larger monthly volume commitments than you think you'll need.

What do you like best?

The Responsys platform offers an exceptionally high degree of customization at various levels, especially through the combination of SQL statements and their built-in functions.

What do you dislike?

Reporting on creatively setup emails is either missing or lacking.

Recommendations to others considering the product

It's a premium platform with a slew of features and functions, definitely geared toward enterprise businesses and any other kinds of businesses requiring almost fully customizable emails and/or more holistic online marketing campaigns. Though it is far from perfect, it is definitely one of the best platforms available at this time.

What do you like best?

The ability to build workflows to automate email marketing. Also am impressed by their dynamic content capabilities.

What do you dislike?

We have had some issues with their tech support in helping us work through some complex issues dealing with inter-connectivity to our internal systems/data.

Recommendations to others considering the product

I would highly recommend Responsys. It is a very robust tool and we are just scratching the surface at what it has to offer our organization. I attended their conference last year and was very impressed with their vision and leadership.

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